Chair by Allen Jones, 1969, which was damaged with paint stripper by feminist campaigners in 1986, will be part of Art Under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm at Tate Britain. Photograph: Allen Jones/Tate/PA

The attacks on art in the Reformation age did more than make churches greyer places – Britain's culture became suspicious of images. While Catholic Italy gloried in the visual, we preferred to rely on the word of God. This was why Britain did not produce great Renaissance artists like Michelangelo or Caravaggio. Instead we had Shakespeare. It has been argued that the massive loss of visual beauty in Shakespeare's Britain fed a new sensual joy in language – a lost pleasure in images was replaced with the richness of Shakespeare's English speech.

There has been a wave of attacks on art in the past 12 months, from Rothko to Constable. How do these idiotic acts compare with the assaults on art that changed Britain in the Reformation?

People were not attacking art 500 years ago. They were attacking "idols". The reason sacred images in churches and abbeys had to be destroyed was that they set up saints as false gods. Idolatrous art, claimed the devout reformers, perverted the Christian faith into a pagan cult.

Only in our eyes are the medieval objects they damaged wonderful art. For Protestant vandals in the past they were superstitious totems.

Today, art is no longer widely seen as either a vessel of religion or a dangerous false idol. Religious paintings hang in museums as art, to be looked at aesthetically, not religiously. And yet the sacred has returned in a strange way. Art in museums is cherished as special and redemptive. It is revered.

Art is not prayed to in modern Britain. It is set apart though, and that makes it a target.